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DAN GUNDERSON: It was a warm summer day five migrant workers were hoeing weeds in a sugar beet field near Crookston. Griselda Lopez remembers it was mid-morning when an airplane started spraying the field. She says the plane flew right over them.

GRISELDA LOPEZ: The big cloud of pesticide was just on top of us. It was just fumigating us totally. It covered our bodies and everything. And we started yelling and jumping so that the guy could see us, and he never stopped. So we started running towards the truck.

DAN GUNDERSON: Lopez says they were sick before they got to the edge of the field.

GRISELDA LOPEZ: My son was vomiting by that time, and so was I, and it had a real strong odor. And when you would smell it, it would burn in your nose inside your nostrils. Our skin was wet. The pesticide went through our shirts and our pants. My son continued vomiting all through the following day, and we all had stomachaches, and our red eyes didn't get better until days after.

DAN GUNDERSON: The Lopez family went to a local clinic. They explained what had happened. A doctor told them the symptoms were likely from the flu or a cold. That's not unusual. Experts who study pesticide exposure say doctors often miss pesticide poisoning. The symptoms of pesticide poisoning can be just like the flu or asthma.

Many doctors are not well trained to look for pesticide exposure. After seeing a doctor, Griselda Lopez called the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. That's the only state agency which monitors pesticide sales, use, and misuse. Lopez was told to put the family's clothing in garbage bags. An Ag Department investigator collected the shirts, pants, and shoes the next day. Ag Department tests found no pesticide residue on the clothing. Lopez says her repeated calls to investigators were not returned.

GRISELDA LOPEZ: It made me feel like instead of protecting us, they were working against us. I felt that I wasn't represented at all, and we were the victims, and we were-- they wanted us to feel like we were the bad guys.

DAN GUNDERSON: The Lopez family was sprayed in 1993. They returned to Texas. Their case remained open at the AG department for seven years. In 2000, the case was closed. The Ag Department said the statute of limitations had run out. The Lopez family sued the cropduster who sprayed them. They reached an out-of-court settlement. But the lawsuit raised serious questions about the Ag Department investigation. According to an internal Ag Department memo, the crop duster violated state and federal law.

In the memo, a supervisor wondered if the obvious violation of law should be pursued, but the case remained closed. In a legal deposition the Ag Department's top investigator couldn't explain what happened. Paul Liemandt is the Department's Environmental Response and Enforcement Manager. He said he didn't know why the case was open for seven years. But in a recent interview, Liemandt admitted the case fell through the cracks. He says the enforcement process is now fixed, and all allegations of pesticide misuse are aggressively investigated.

PAUL LIEMANDT: And certainly, if there are animals or humans involved where adverse effects have been reported and confirmed there will be a significant greater penalty associated with that type of an enforcement action.

DAN GUNDERSON: But in the Lopez case, there were no penalties. Nothing happened to the farmer who admitted spraying the field where the Lopez family was working. Family members had symptoms of pesticide poisoning. But the Ag Department found no pesticide residue on clothes worn by the workers that day. Attorneys were puzzled until they found an explanation in Ag Department records. The department tested for the wrong pesticide. David Thompson is a Grand Forks attorney who represented the Lopez family. Thompson says the Ag Department did not do its job. He says the case was so poorly handled. He considered suing the Ag Department for failing to uphold the law.

PAUL LIEMANDT: These particular investigations were non-aggressive, incomplete. There was almost a hostility displayed toward the migrant laborers who I represented. It was almost that they had the audacity to complain that they'd been sprayed with these toxic substances and that they had suffered illnesses and injuries as a result.

DAN GUNDERSON: Lopez family members say they still suffer from asthma and skin disorders. Doctors can't confirm those ailments are a result of pesticide exposure. Minnesota law says, it's illegal to directly spray someone with a pesticide. It's even illegal to expose people to pesticide drift. The Ag Department says pesticide exposure is not easy to identify, but two key factors are pesticide residue on clothing and medical symptoms. Cheryl Bergen contends human exposure is routinely overlooked by the Ag. Department Bergen worked as a legal services attorney for nine years. She says she handled dozens of cases of alleged pesticide exposure to farm workers. She says none of those cases were substantiated by the Ag Department.

CHERYL BENGIN: When you got a state lab that that's their responsibility and role, then you just keep saying, how come you can never find this stuff? I've come to believe that the political power is with growers and that the perspective of the department is to serve the growers. So they don't have the institutional will to be determining that there have been violations of law unless they are incredibly egregious violations.

DAN GUNDERSON: The Minnesota Department of Agriculture is the only state agency with authority to investigate pesticide misuse. Those investigations rely heavily on the Ag Department lab to test for pesticide residue. Paul Liemandt is the Ag Department's Lead Investigator. He says cases of human exposure are given top priority and aggressively investigated, and Liemandt says he has complete confidence in the Ag department lab.

PAUL LIEMANDT: Our laboratory has the capability to probably find and identify and quantify more active ingredients of various pesticides than any laboratory in Minnesota.

DAN GUNDERSON: But in written reports, Liemandt seems to contradict that statement. Paul Liemandt chairs a national organization of pesticide regulatory officials. An issue paper he helped write in 1999 said pesticide monitoring was limited by inadequate lab equipment. The document said state Ag labs could be criticized by those who, quote, "may rightly assert the responsible agencies either do not know how to adequately monitor pesticides in the environment or that they are not willing to do so." Just two months ago, the pesticide regulators group again talked about the issue at their annual meeting. They renewed a plea for additional funding from the Environmental Protection Agency saying, quote, "future monitoring and misuse actions are seriously in peril and may not be achievable with current technologies."

The Minnesota Department of Ag pesticide lab does not have to be accredited by any scientific organization. That means the lab doesn't have to prove to anyone that its testing methods are accurate. By contrast, Minnesota law requires all labs doing work for state agencies to be accredited. Ag Department officials say the lab follows a strict program of quality control to ensure its results are accurate. The Ag Department is the only state agency with authority to investigate pesticide misuse. Only the Ag Department has access to pesticide records. Say the golf course across the street was sprayed yesterday or the field down the road, you can't find out what chemical was used. State law says that information is protected. The Ag Department's Paul Liemandt says, the pesticide industry wanted those records private.

PAUL LIEMANDT: There were moments over the last decade or two when applicators felt that their pesticide application activities were being viewed critically by different communities and that they did not want to be exposed to harassment or even unnecessary inquiry into their activities, if they were performing their work according to the law. Whether a private citizen believes it's an impediment to the right to vital information, I believe you may be correct in saying that it is a obstacle.

DAN GUNDERSON: Some state lawmakers tried last year to open those records. The Ag Department lobbied against the change. Pesticide use records are still protected by Minnesota law. Nick Messer knows that law well. Messer lives on a small farm North of Alexandria. He tried for months to get information about chemicals used on a tree farm next door.

NICK MESSER: Ag Department, and I went around and around and around and nothing ever became of it. Then I just I gave up. You can only make so many long distance phone calls and scream so many times. And after a while, after driving just beating your head up against the wall, driving yourself crazy over it for months, it's pretty much got these kissoff letters like whatever.

DAN GUNDERSON: Nick Messer raises horses and dogs on his small farm. He says four foals died in the last couple of years. The deaths all happened shortly after an adjacent field was sprayed. He says in each case, he saw a helicopter spray something on the nearby tree farm and sometimes on his pasture. Messer says the young horses developed sores around their mouths and on their bodies. Within a day or two, they started staggering around the pasture and quickly died. Autopsies showed the animals died of liver and kidney failure. Messer says around the same time a pregnant dog had a spontaneous abortion, and several mares aborted their foals. Messer says he and his nephew got sick when they went into the pasture to remove a dead horse.

NICK MESSER: I don't know. It's a weird smell. It's like-- it's almost like if you mix kerosene, helix, and ammonia together. It's just got this really weird gassy smell to it. It makes you like really sick, pukey sick. It gives you really bad headaches.

DAN GUNDERSON: The smell may have been a chemical. It may have been something else. Nick Messer can't know. State law protects the records. What really angered Nick Messer was an experience one Saturday in July of 2001. He and his wife were outside with their two-year-old daughter Whitney they were checking on horses in a pasture near their house.

NICK MESSER: And all of a sudden, we heard all this the big helicopter going. We had really no idea what it was at first. But we were over there on the driveway on the edge of the hay fields there, and they just started spraying. But it was really windy day. It was coming from that direction and just blew right towards their house, and it was just like this big cloud just coming.

DAN GUNDERSON: Nick Messer worried his daughter Whitney may have been exposed to a pesticide. So he called his family doctor. Dr. David Freeman says the child suffered no obvious health effects. But Dr. Freeman says he could not get information about what pesticides may have been used around the Messer farm.

DAVID FREEMAN: The patient care for this family has been less than optimum. And so from now on, when we see Whitney Messer every year, I've got a little bit keener eye towards anything that might be abnormal, whether that would be looking for cancers or looking for a neurologic deficits.

DAN GUNDERSON: Dr. Freeman says he was incredulous when he learned pesticide spraying records are private under Minnesota law.

NICK MESSER: Common sense would say, why is that law there? The only thing that I can see that it does is it protects a company from litigation because you can't get at it. The other thing is that I asked the question, why can't I get that? Is it that toxic to the environment that we shouldn't be using it? I mean, if they're spraying stuff that they have to hide, what the heck are they spraying it for?

NICK MESSER: Dr. Freeman was so upset. He wrote a letter to the State Health Department, requesting an investigation. He expressed concern about chronic exposure for the young girl. A health department official wrote to the department of agriculture asking them to investigate. In a lengthy response, the Ag Department insisted there was no evidence nimasa's property or family were exposed to pesticides. The memo also challenged Messer's credibility, saying he was uncooperative with investigators. He didn't provide all the information they asked for. Messer admits he was angry and frustrated. But he says he felt the Ag department was trying to stymie his efforts to get an investigation.

NICK MESSER: This is still America, and you pay taxes to have these Ag Department's government agencies protect the people. They should be protecting the people that they were meant to protect. It's just to protect ourselves, and that's not going real well either.

DAN GUNDERSON: Nick Messer's complaints prompted some action. The Ag Department looked at the records of three local sprayers. They found several state and federal laws were broken. But investigators said there was no connection to Nick Messer's complaint. The Ag Department sent advisory notices to those who broke the law. An advisory notice is a letter explaining which laws were broken. There are no fines or penalties. Ag department records show very few cases of human exposure are substantiated, and warnings are far more common than fines.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture says it enforces the law based on facts. It can't rely on what people may think happened to them. Stuart Wagenius says he knows exactly what happened to him. But the Ag Department couldn't solve the case. In the summer of 1999, Wagenius was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. He was studying purple coneflower plants on some land he owns in West Central Minnesota. One morning, as he and his assistant pollinated plants, they noticed a spray plane flying over a nearby field. Wagenius says they watched the plane for about 20 minutes while they worked.

STUART WAGENIUS: Then the crop duster flew further away than normal and then came back and flew straight at us, and we stood up and, then the guy just sprayed whatever he was spraying right on us. We were just dumbfounded. We couldn't believe that this guy had sprayed us. We could see the plane very clearly. We could see a single person in the plane. He obviously saw us.

DAN GUNDERSON: Department of Agriculture tests found Stuart Wagenius and his assistant had been sprayed with the common herbicide 24D. Wagenius says there were two eyewitness descriptions of the airplane. The Ag Department knew who hired the crop duster, but the department closed the case, noting they were unable to identify the pilot who sprayed Wagenius and his assistant. The Ag Department says the pilot was uncooperative and refused to admit he was spraying that day. Environmental response and enforcement manager Paul Liemandt says he's satisfied with the investigation. Stuart Wagenius is not.

STUART WAGENIUS: I think the Department of Agriculture is pretty lame because here's an example where they have so much evidence, so many fingers pointing at the guy who sprayed me, and they're making all these excuses that they can't find out who it is. The basic message to the sprayer is, go ahead and spray people, and nothing's going to happen. That just seems really wrong to me.

DAN GUNDERSON: What happened that July morning in 1999 also seemed wrong to Stewart's mother, DFL State Representative Jean Wagenius of Minneapolis, Representative Wagenius contacted Ag Department officials. She says she wanted to know how such incidents could be avoided in the future.

JEAN WAGENIUS: You can't go back and correct what happened to my son. But I did want to see something happen so that other moms and dads wouldn't have to worry about their children, and the department absolutely refused to have any kind of changes made. They just wanted the same old, same old. And so that is probably the most worrisome thing to me because this then is a situation that's going to repeat itself again and again and again.

DAN GUNDERSON: Jean Wagenius says, Ag Department officials tried to explain why she should not push for tougher regulation.

JEAN WAGENIUS: They talked about all sorts of things. Well, these aerial sprayers are like cowboys, and you have to understand they're kind of like cowboys, and you just can't do anything here. They have to do things fast, and they have to-- they're going to be mistakes. And well, that's just the way it is. Representative Jean Wagenius is not the only legislator who's tried and failed to change pesticide law. DFL State Representative Mary Ellen Otremba owns a farm near long prairie. Last year, she proposed opening pesticide records for public inspection. She says the Ag department and the agribusiness lobby moved swiftly to kill the proposal.

MARY ELLEN OTREMBA: Friends of mine who were around both the lobbyists and some of the people within the department said that the department was furious. They were scrambling.

DAN GUNDERSON: The Ag department protested it would cost millions to implement such a system. But Otremba says the information already exists. Pesticide applicators are required by law to keep detailed records. Otremba argues, the Ag Department should make those records available for public inspection.

MARY ELLEN OTREMBA: I think they're bought off by big Ag. It seems like money is in control instead of people. We're just country folk. So to speak as they look at us, and our incomes aren't very high. So maybe we're not so smart either. And people are people, and we should be looking at the health and safety of everybody.

DAN GUNDERSON: The Ag Department denies any conflict between its role of promoting agriculture and enforcing pesticide laws. Environmental Response and Enforcement Manager Paul Liemandt says, the department walks the middle ground.

PAUL LIEMANDT: There are people that would like strict regulation. There are people that would like no regulation. I think the department has a record. Those records are available for you that over the entire body of work that we do, I think, we're being fair, but firm.

DAN GUNDERSON: Liemandt says in the past four years, the department sent 16 warning letters about human exposure. In the same period, the department investigated at least 75 human exposure cases. Some state legislators say they will try again this year to open pesticide records for public scrutiny. Dan Gunderson, Minnesota Public Radio, Moorhead.